I think it’s credible that in Xinjiang there has been a harsh policy of compulsory education aimed at Islamist Radicals as a consequence of terrorist attacks linked to ISIS, which albeit hard, was successful.

I also think that, from a Chinese point of view, reeducation is a much less sensitive topic. Most Chinese students spend their teenage years in boarding schools, so to many Chinese people, spending a few years in an educational institution isn’t quite as radical. A lot of the training received in the reeducation centers was vocational training that modernized the labor force of Uyghurs in Xinjiang enabling them to get better jobs than they used to have, since the province is ongoing fast economic and industrial progress and quality of life is rising enormously.

I think isolated abuses of power by authorities should be condemned and minimized, but I also believe there is no serious independent data pointing to anything other than isolated cases, especially given how the few non-anonymous interviews are coming from western news outlets.